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Fukushima. Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. Kyshtym. When a solar plant breaks down or a dam bursts the worst that can happen is a minor inconvenience. When yo
by new_guy 5y ago
Fukushima.
Three Mile Island.
Chernobyl.
Kyshtym.
When a solar plant breaks down or a dam bursts the worst that can happen is a minor inconvenience. When you get a nuclear meltdown you get land uninhabitable for literal millennia and global contamination.
- standardUser 5y agoNot sure why anyone would downvote this. Legitimate or not, a lot of public fear about nuclear energy is due to the first three names on that list.
- sofixa 5y agoBecause it is not legitimate.
- standardUser 5y agoBut it is the correct answer to the question of why people have turned their back on nuclear energy.
- Ericson2314 5y agoBecause there is no major contamination from Fukushima and Three Mile Island. I'm convinced most people got confused with the Fukushima and the actual Tsunami damage to Japan at some subconscious level.
- michaelcampbell 5y agoI suspect he's saying people are AFRAID of nuclear because of those incidents; not that the fear is rational.
- Ericson2314 5y agoPP said it's about perception, true are false. That I agreed with. But GP had no qualifications. > When a solar plant breaks down or a dam bursts the worst that can happen is a minor inconvenience. When you get a nuclear meltdown you get land uninhabitable for literal millennia and global contamination. This is a not a fair comparison if we are talking facts not perceptions. It ignores issues of storage that doesn't make the energy outputs commensurate. It ignores the constant polution and health issue stemming from fossil fuel power plants when nothing goes wrong --- since the ability to use solar and wind wihtout those is as-of-yet undemonstrated at scale.
- ericd 5y agoWhen a dam bursts, it is not “a minor inconvenience”. There tend to be a lot of people living downstream.
- techplex 5y agoPlease cite your sources. There are people living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/moving_to_Chernobyl https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/moving_to_Cherno...
- alexgmcm 5y agoA dam bursting can cause mass fatalities, it's definitely a lot more severe than a minor inconvenience. And the alternative to nuclear at the moment isn't really solar or hydropower (most places aren't suitable for it) but rather coal and gas. And those are continually polluting the environment not just with CO2 but also carcinogens and other pollutants. Of that list of accidents only Chernobyl is still uninhabitable, so it's hardly "literal millennia" Three Mile Island didn't even kill anyone and many believe neither did Fukushima.
- sofixa 5y agoI had to look the last one up: > The Kyshtym disaster, sometimes referred to as the Mayak disaster or Ozyorsk disaster in newer sources, was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on 29 September 1957 at Mayak, a plutonium production site for nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant located in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-40 (now Ozyorsk) in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union So it's even less related to this nuclear power plant than Chernobyl. The only incident vaguely relatable is Fukushima, and guess what, they weren't really up to the required security standards and it took an enormous earthquake and tsunami to do actual damage, which is still very limited and resulted in less deaths than what, a month of a coal power plant? > dam bursts the worst that can happen is a minor inconvenience Seriously? Dam failures can be catastrophic and very deadly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure
- KptMarchewa 5y agoAll nuclear incidents together caused less than 1% of yearly deaths from coal.
- greenshackle2 5y agoBanqiao and Shimantan dams failure: 240,000 deaths, 11 million homes destroyed > minor inconvenience Hmmm.